I am breezy!

I have started these morning cycle rides. They were supposed to make my mornings early mornings, as well as give me an agile start for the day. Since 8 am is earlier than 9 am, I’m guessing I succeeded.

This morning was a special experience though. My sister and I set out from our house in Besant Nagar in search of what is officially called Tiruvanmiyur beach. Now, non-Chennaiites have this romantic image in their mind where one beach merges into another, allowing cyclists a breezy ride along the coast. It’s another matter that cycling along the beach is mostly terribly windy and not breezy. 

Before I got my bicycle to Chennai, I was apprehensive that I would never be able to ride them on the roads, thanks to speed-crazy motorists. I have also had some headlights blinked on me by massive Japanese automobiles claiming their right of way over my BSA SLR. But, on the whole, I’ve managed to retain my space and enjoy cross country rides, at least in Besant Nagar. 

The thought of riding in Tiruvanmiyur, the IT hub and possibly the fastest growing commercial area in Chennai, did scare me. It turned out not too many vehicles had ventured out, courtesy Mattu Pongal. Besides there was the wall of the Kalakshetra campus to stick to and save oneself from sudden bursts of wheels at least from one direction. 

We stood at Tiruvanmiyur temple, faced with a road turning left, seaward, and another going straight. An auto-wallah had told us at Bessie that the beach we were looking for was about 4 km away, and we definitely hadn’t traveled so far yet. So, when a shopkeeper told us that the distance to the T beach wasn’t large enough to be measured in kms and we had to take the left, we thankfully took it. 

Weaving past fish markets, where people oddly were perturbed by our bicycles despite three large cars stubbornly creating quite a jam right in the middle of the road, we reached the ‘kuppam beach road’. It was a slum, and the sea was plainly visible, lashing waves at the shore. I addressed a boy staring at us : “Where is the Tiruvanmiyur beach?” Immediately I felt foolish, and the boy must have sensed that. For his look changed from puzzled to indifferent and he said, ”This is the beach.” 

Not having much of a point to argue against that, we turned right and went southward in search of the official T beach. We did find one, which a man squatting nearby guffawed was in fact the “lovers’ beach”. Disheartened we settled for figuring out a way back by-passing the fish market, when we encountered a colleague of mine. I waved down the lifeline and thankfully enquired to him in a language I knew he would understand, “We were trying to find our way to what is officially the T beach, but don’t seem to be able to do that.” 

He gave us directions, which we noted for a future trip. Now, are my communication skills limited to a certain circle – class and kind- of people who have similar communication skills? Actually, I know that’s not true, for there have been plenty of other times, in fact all other times, when I have been able to travel to a certain place by enquiring directions perfectly in the local tongue. Even when the local language was literally not what I knew. 

I was just trying to introduce some food for though in a perfect non-agenda narrative. I feel weird writing something like that. I mean, where is the peg then?

 

 

Privatisation of public space

Public space is a concept that we as an urbanizing society seem to be not catching up with in western terms in our obsession with growth and other popular notions of comfort and status. A significant evidence strides proudly before us everyday, a gleaming metallic box mounted on four wheels - the car, a marvel invented by the sheer ingenuity of mankind, a disaster in the making all credit to mankind again. 

 

It was while driving down to office on my two-wheeled oil guzzler, cursing huge concoctions of wheels that were righteously claiming their right of way over bicycles and pedestrians, that I realized how directly cars signify exemplify the vicious cycle in resource allocation in free markets. It was the same day I read that worldwide traffic rules say that pedestrians have a right of way on roads.

 

Coming back to resource allocation, take the resource of public space-the commons.

 

Cars have taken up a major chunk of space on roads – precious public space for mobility, because of their monetary power to do so. In other words, I buy a car; I own the space that my car occupies on the road. True, I have paid road tax. I can even claim that I am part of the minuscule section of income tax-payers in India, whose money has been used in building those roads in the first place.

 

Whereas, the next person doesn’t earn enough to pay tax, nor to buy a car. His right of mobility has taken back seat against the right of citizens to own and drive a car, as there is only so much space available on the road and that has to be shared. His right to use that tiny piece of public space that his feet occupy has been reigned over by the right of a car owner to park his 4-wheeled steed. The pedestrian slowly gets excluded from urban roads.

 

A mobility handicap in a metro is as good as an economic handicap. Newly created wealth gets re-allocated to the car-owner who can pay for it using the resources he has saved by easy mobility. He can consume it for betterment in life, as he has saved personal energy in commuting. He can buy yet another car which can exclude yet another pedestrian from urban public life.

 

Cars have effectively managed to privatize most of the public space available on road. What’s more, they claim that the ‘menace of two wheelers’ in our roads, and the ‘lack of traffic sense among our pedestrians’ are the problems in the urban transport system today. They just need to look around to find every second inch of our roads covered by a car occupying half the space that a bus occupies, but carrying just one person – 1/35^th that a bus carries.

Chennai's own rollercoaster gateway

Going round and round and round…. One can have a lot of fun driving and arriving back where one started. That’s Kathipara Grade Separator for you. I give it to the planners or rather the developers of this superfluous structure that they have signboards at every point where a driver might be confounded. So, it really is not possible to end where you began, unless you intend to.

 

While the utility of a flyover or an underpass is construably more apparent, this twisting and turning maze of roads piled over one another, to ease congestion in a single crossroads, eluded the grasp of my reasoning. Like this wordy expression of my bewilderment, the ride on ‘Kathipara’ was fun; however it seemed unlikely an adult mind would reconcile it on the justification of ‘fun’. After all, money and material and energy were spent on building it, for three whole years. And god bless a cyclist or a pedestrian trying to cross the junction.

 

Apart from such trivial concerns about a minor set of people (The Kathipara, after all, was built for the greater common good), what really stumped me about the ‘grade separator’ is how having a maze of roads actually made it easier to navigate for a driver than a straightforward intersection.

 

On my third trip on this roller coaster, it dawned on me. Those clever urban transport planners. They have our motorists figured out. They knew it wasn’t possible to restrain vehicles within lanes, or behind signals, in an orderly manner. They decided to have fun, sending motorists around in circles, leaving them with no choice but to cling on for dear life and follow the signboards religiously!

 

What’s more, such a set up allowed for plenty of tarmac to stall the vehicles on before the real junction point – the bottleneck at the foot of the bridge – was cleared out for the ‘splash’! The profundity of it awed me so much that Kathipara turned into poetry, only too elite to be of much use. Imagine if our motorists, overjoyed by the sudden gift of concrete to vroom on, added more to their already sprawling collection of wheels. Imagine if all those wheels gridlocked the entire ‘grade separator’. The minority pedestrians and cyclists would have a ball underneath the flyovers, crossing and reaching work without having to look out for a hit and run every second!

No face always looks the same...

Communism as a philosophy, as a way of life and as a solution to the existing problems enthralled a lot of the intellectuals during the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Most of the works pertaining to this theory were formulated and documented during this time too. We must remember that in the 1870s when Das Capital was being drafted, the age of electricity was yet to commence. Communism was proposed as a solution that would address the shortcomings of the contemporary socio-economic structure in the 19th century. The inhuman working conditions (20-30 people accommodated in 850 square feet area in the cities) and working hours (14-16 hours of working for the entire family) that the proletariats were subjected to in the 19th century were the primary problems that communism intended to address.

What one needs to remember is, that the intellectuals who contributed to this theory were predominantly from today's bastions of free markets. When we look back and analyse the rise and fall of communism over the past century, we tend to ignore that the effectiveness of the guard sitting outsided a bank with a gun in his hand cannot be determined by the number of rounds of bullets he has fired during his career.

The very fear of there being a revolution, the very thought of communism as an idea becoming the favorite child of the masses, the very idea of communists taking over, and taking away the liberties and the luxuries enjoyed by the capitalists has forced the bourgeoisie to relent and extend an unperceivable standard of living to a large section of the working class. A standard of living, which probably would have been considered insane by their predecessors and detrimental to the profit margins about a century ago.

The standard of living has been extended to a large part of the proletariat to ensure that there would not be discontented, discontented enough for the proletariat (what we now term as the working class, which has become so stratified over the past century, that the upper half cannot even be termed as proletariat in the real sense of the term) to unite, unite enough to topple the existing structure

Sometimes the mere presence of a competitor can make one perform better and attain the targets that one envisages to attain. In the case of capitalism, the antagonist was communism. And true it is, that communism failed wherever the existing system was taken over by the communists. But one needs to remember one thing. Communism was the budding graduate, who secured the top rank in all disciplines, but when he actually did graduate and enter the big bad world; he was nothing more than a fresher; a cricketer who has trained all his life in net practices and is pitted against one of the most lethal pace bowling attacks on a green pitch. And whatsoever one may say, the fact, the knowledge that communism does exist, the fear that the community (the proletariat) at any point of time can go on and resort to the measures that communism preaches actually caused capitalism to mellow down. The mission statement of a capitalist firm HCL Technologies – EMPLOYEE FIRST, will probably make Hegel, Engel and Marx sit up in their graves and argue that this isn't the same capitalism that they were out to fight. Or maybe not, maybe they'd just smile in their beards (I am assuming that all of them had one), and consider this to be one of the many victories of the proletariat in recent times. But they know, we know, that the battle is far from over.

The battle of the society, for the society that communism envisaged, the striking disparity in the standard of living that it intended to do away with, is far from over. This time the protagonists definitely are not the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

For the good, for the bad, the society has evolved. The issues that we are faced with today, are very different from those that troubled us about a century ago. Today, the greatest challenge that lies ahead of us is to ensure that we include everyone, and not just the working class as we grow. The challenge is to extend at least a minimum standard of living to everyone in every city, to everyone beyond every city.

We need to extend the basic social and economic infrastructure to every single human being on this earth. We need to attain inclusive growth. This maybe our aim for the next century.

As we try to sustain a scorching pace of growth, we need to sit back and assess our growth. Do we really want a growth driven by consumption. A growth wherein more is being consumed by the same few, a growth wherein the same few actually consume more than they need to, in a few cases even more more than they can afford to. Or are we envisaging a growth which brings into the fold many more. If we opt for the latter, it is possible that we may slow down a bit, but we may find it to be worth it.

Maybe the name of the struggle needs to be changed. The left and right are not so left and so right anymore. Communism no longer is pitted against capitalism. Maybe, humanism is. Against something called consumerism.

- Chirantan

Standing up...

Ask a Mumbai-local regular the small mercies that are on offer in a Chennai local. The peak hour traffic not withstanding, there always is enough space for a person to stand on both his feet and avail of a constant smell of fresh air. Of course unlike the Mumbai locals, the Chennai trains do not provide one with the luxury of being supported on all sides by the fellow passengers at every given point of time. One has to constantly grapple around for support; at least an unstable person like me needs to.

Today, we got into a Tambaram-bound train at Park. I rushed on to fetch myself a window seat, as my friend ambled along in his, ‘I don’t care what I end up getting' attitude as he always does.

One never can get enough of a window seat, especially when a light drizzle with the sun setting in the distance, is what is on display. We were ten minutes into the journey and the window show was proving to be another box office hit. The train had reached Mambalam by now; the station where the trains lose their tranquility and become more of what a train in an Indian metro should be like at an evening hour.

I was restlessly fidgeting with the window railings, like a calf tied a metre away from the manger. My friend had lapsed into a quiet nap, or so I thought. That is when; he got up with a jerk and offered his seat to this elderly person, who was standing in our part of the compartment. I looked at my friend with disapproval, but he handed over his bag to me and went out to stand at the footboard, another thing I don’t really approve of.

It always is a tricky situation, every time we see someone senior, someone really tired, sick or injured standing a couple of metres away from our seat. We do feel like getting up, and offering our seat, but more often than not something holds us, (I mean me) back.
Today, was no different. I had seen the old man get into the train, and his face reflected discomfort. But I chose to look away. I knew the damage had been done. A strange sense of guilt would not let me enjoy the rest of the nature show, and yet something even stranger would not let me stand up and offer my seat to the man. And somehow my friend seemed to be completely oblivious to that strange feeling. I was wondering how my friend always is so sure about everything he does.

And that is when something startlingly out-of-the-world happened? “Wondering if your friend did the right thing by offering me the seat,” that old man enquired. That question caught me totally off-guard and I really didn’t know how to reply. In recent times, the only other occasions, which have managed to make me blush so generously, have been those when a beautiful girl would catch me staring at her. A sheepish, “Not exactly,” is all that I could summon myself to say.

“It so happens, that when I was of your age, in fact for most of my life, I never offered a seat to anyone. It just felt so weird. For most of my working life, I’d do up-down through trains with this colleague of mine. In the 20-odd years that I travelled with him, there must have been thousands of occasions when my friend would just stand up and offer his seat to any and every stranger he’d feel needed it more than him. There must have been numerous occasions when I tried to talk him out of this strange habit. He’d give just one argument, “I am sure that someday we’d reap the fruits of the goodness that I am sowing.” My friend never needed anyone to make place for him in any train though. He signed out of life when he was at his best, died of a heart attack five years ago. Since, then, just to keep his spirit alive, just to rekindle his memory, once in a while when I’d get carried away by emotions, I’d offer my seat to someone I’d feel needed it more than I did, but without much conviction. I had a knee-operation a month ago and today happens to be the first time I am traveling on my own, by a local since then. All the way to the station and as I got into the train, there was only one question ringing in my head, ‘Will someone stand up for me today?’ And some one did, just like that, the moment I got into the train. Wish my friend was around, to know that he was right, all along.”

What is it that makes us stop doing all the things that we want to, but just don’t? Why do we always get lost in the moral gray area and try to categorise everything as right and wrong? Do we really believe that we are promoting mediocrity; every time someone who can afford to, sacrifices a little something for someone he/she agrees needs a little more? Will it be pity that will make you make way for someone else, or will it be something as simple as spreading goodwill and the message of goodness?

The fact that the equity markets are a risky affair, doesn’t really make us stop investing, does it? No, because the returns that we stand to gain are definitely worth the risk. Why then, should we even give it a second thought when it comes to investing in goodwill and goodness?

We’d reached our destination, Guindy. I whispered, “Thanks,” to the old man as I stood up to leave. As we alighted, my friend cast a questioning glance enquiring what the old man was muttering to me. There’s no way I am going to tell him, what he did. He will guess it anyways, I guess; when he’ll notice that I’ve stopped casting the reproachful look every time he offers his seat; when he notices that I too stand up and make myself count when it matters…

- Chirantan

Why I like the rains!!!

There is something about the rains. Something unreal, something surreal. Every time they came along, they bring along with them a strange freshness, something that dissolves all the dust that has hitherto gathered on the dusty roads, on the rusty leaves, on the thirsty souls. And the true spirit of life gets unleashed.

An hour-long paddle, through the puddles of few of the busiest roads of the city, definitely had its role to play to arouse, that strange disgust that besieges me every time I am confronted with the unabashed luxury on display at our five/seven (I don't know how many)-star hotels, with a greater intensity today.

The press meet was organised by a real estate major, which will be commencing operations of its luxury resort on the Kanya Kumari coast on October 31. All the villas, and rooms in the resort have been constructed in such a way, that the customer will be able to enjoy the pristine confluence of the Bengal waters with the Arabian Sea in the Indian Ocean, exclusively from his room.

When Sunil Shetty had bought out a part of the Chowpatty beach for his exclusive Sports Club, H20 some eight years back, I felt that the charm of the beach had been taken away from it. It really surprised me, how a person had been able to buy out a part of public property that was a part of the city's heritage to make it exclusive? Raj Thackerey communism can probably fetch you more votes than communalism, the choice is yours. Anyways, is it really necessary to make everything beautiful exclusive? I can understand the need to maintain the exclusivity of the grandiose at display in Park Sheraton. Hundreds of crores of rupees need to be pumped in to erect these modern marvels of luxury and hospitality. But Chowpatty? The Kanyakumari Bay?

Probably, Mr XYZ of Auromatrix Hotels Pvt Ltd, erecting the Sparsa resort at Kanya Kumari, can argue, "When Swami Vivekanand, actually sailed into Kanya Kumari, a dire need for a good hotel was felt. We should not be caught napping this time round. And anyways we will be contributing to the state's treasury by making a part of the bay exclusive. This will in turn help us achieve the inclusive growth, that we yearn for." And who knows, this might even serve as a point. Fair enough.

Anyways, on my way back from Park Sheraton, I took the 21G, got down at Guindy station, waded through the subway and lots of more mud. Just a share-auto and I'd be back in the comforts of an air-conditioned office, a luxury that I have got used to, a luxury that doesn't ruffle my spirit up anymore.

The share autowalas too wanted to make hay while it rained. A Guindy station - Olympia tech park ride which should ideally cost, Rs 5 was today being catered at Rs 7. While getting in I made it clear that I won't pay a penny more than the normal rate. However, I guess the idea had failed to cross the language barrier.

I had been made to sit on the front seat, with my bag hanging out and my left sleeve left to the mercy of the rains, and no one had been in a mood to budge an inch today, the rains included.

I decided to join the party and refused to pay the extra two rupees to the share-autowala on getting down at Olympia. "It isn't about the two rupees. It is about not promoting the opportunistic mentality that grips so many of us and lures us into taking advantage of someone else's agony to make some more money," I told myself.

The free-market demand-supply principle gets jeopardized, when supply is manipulated every time the demand is seen to get caught up in a tricky situation. One can always argue, that if one auto-wala charges more, there always will be other autowalas, who will be ready to operate at a lower margin, and try to draw a few more customers from the previous autowalas. Well, it did not happen today. India is a fast growing, shrewd economy. People have learnt to do their homework in their businesses. Networking and collaborating with the competitors, to ensure that the maximum possible price can be drawn from the customer for any product, service rendered at any value point; has become the norm of the day. The autowalas are no exception.

This autowala was not ready to budge. I spotted a traffic policeman a few metres away and decided to take my chances. I said, "Do what you can, I won't pay the extra two rupees!" and just had to walk away from the scene. The autowala seemed to be lauding my spirit, in Tamil, but I guess the traffic policeman's presence had done the trick. Mere presence of a regulator sometimes can serve the purpose. I had managed to save two rupees!!

When things are not going your way, nothing does. After having spent more than two minutes at the road divider and seeing the traffic flowing in from the recently inaugurated flyover refusing to relent and stop for a few seconds unless asked to do so, I took a couple of paces and tried to slow down the traffic, but the Maruti Esteem guy seemed to be in no mood to get delayed. He kept honking, he even switched on his headlights but didn't put his foot on the brake. A basketball player's reflexes had to be summoned to get out of his way just in time. I felt like running after him and giving him a piece of my mind. Instead I decided to prey on the car behind him. However, to my dismay I didn't even have to wave my hand to stop the next guy. They had decided to make way for us. After crossing the road, it struck me that the traffic policeman I had spotted while getting down from the share auto wasn't doing his job. A little neck-stretching and I got to know that he was actually shouting at a share autowala. Regulators, sometimes end up forgetting their primary jobs. But we can't fault them, not them alone. There is so much that remains to be done.
Some other time same day, on my way in another auto.... The driver was wading slowly through one of the many huge puddles that have submerged the roads and flyovers gifted by the chief minister to his city. A white Maruti Esteem zoomed past us and splashed a bucketful of water on the face of my autowala. The damage had been restricted to my T-shirt and I had been spared of the humiliation of having mud splashed onto my face. But the autowala didn't seem to be a Gandhian. He picked up speed once out of the puddle and trailed the Esteem at a commendable pace for a couple of hundred metres. Finally, when a traffic signal got the better of the Maruti, the autowala caught up with the car, and made the driver step into the rains. From nowhere, two-three colleagues of the autowala emerged and sprayed a volley of Tamil one-liners on the Marutiwala's esteem.

What goes around, definitely does come around. One needs to get out of one's air-conditioned car and get drenched in the rains for a few minutes to understand that rains in the city, doesn't just imply the luxury to be able to carve your name on the windows from the inside of your cars; the joy of being able to zoom through the puddles across the city and the slight delays you have to deal with as you reach your destination high and dry. It also means getting drenched from head to toe and having to travel in buses full of wet stench, it means having to work with sticky clothes and smelly shoes on, for the rest of the day. It also means collecting all your life's buyings under the thatched roof and putting them inside one plastic bag and rushing with your kids to some subway, some railway station...some place where the rains can't get your kids, the rains can't get you...

Anyways, I better go and file a good story for Sparsa Resorts, the content for which I actually get paid. After all, we all want to live to fight another day, we all live today for that some other day!!!

P.S. DL3CR338 is the white Maruti Esteem and E367 is the no-nonsense autowala, just in case you want to catch up with them.

-Chirantan